Armed Forces: Academies Out of Line

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Among U.S. military officers, they're known as "ring knockers" because they proudly wear the big, gold class rings they earned when they graduated from one of America's military academies. For generations the ring signified that the wearer was a cut above. No longer: the ring knockers are losing their grip on the armed forces. When Admiral Jeremy Boorda becomes chief of naval operations this month, five of the six Joint Chiefs of Staff will be nonacademy men who have come up through the enlisted ranks or from officer- training programs.

Such meager representation among the topmost brass is just one sign of the steady decline of influence among America's military academies. They have come under siege by critics who believe they cost too much and should be radically changed. The U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, which is struggling to recover from a major cheating scandal, will host a discussion this month aptly titled "Service Academies: Leadership Crucibles or Magnificent Anachronisms?" All the academies are suffering from declining enrollment and struggling to develop a curriculum suitable to the post-cold war era. By doing so, however, they risk losing the very thing that set them apart. Last week a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point acknowledged that the school is no longer a rigid temple of martial arts and science. "I expected a very military environment," says Cadet Jason Squier, a junior from Norwalk, Iowa. "It surprised me that West Point is a lot closer to a civilian college than most people would expect."

The annual cost of all three schools approaches $1 billion. "I just don't think they're worth the money we're spending on them," says Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon personnel chief and ex-Navy officer. "It's hard to justify the cost given the other sources we have for officers." Korb, who is not an academy grad, and other critics suggest that the academies should become multiservice, postgraduate schools, where officers-to-be train for a year or so before commissioning, like the military academies of Britain and France.

As the distinctions between the academies and civilian schools blur, the ! military honor code is what sets them apart. But that too is under attack, most recently in the biggest cheating scandal in Annapolis history. A special Navy panel recommended on March 31 that the Navy Secretary punish 71 members of the class of 1994, 29 of them by expulsion, for cheating on a 1992 engineering exam. What outraged many academy supporters, including some admirals, was the unsuccessful lawsuit, filed by 40 midshipmen implicated in the scandal, seeking to halt the panel's work. The middies contended their constitutional rights were violated by prosecutors who pressured the students to confess. Their litigiousness, said a four-star officer, "really bothers me."